Back to her roots

Being adopted has inspired Mary Gauthier like no artist before her

Over 13 years and six albums, singing in that cracked voice that channels Johnny Cash’s last days, Mary Gauthier has established a reputation as one of the finest American songwriters around. Although tracks such as I Drink, Mercy Now and Different Kind of Gone are snapshots of a life laid bare, nothing prepares you for the searing honesty of her new album, The Foundling — a song cycle about adoption.

Most female songwriters — even those for whom soul-baring, self-loathing, angst and unrequited or broken love affairs are sources of inspiration — have skirted round the subject. One might think that being abandoned at birth would prove fertile ground for creativity, but perhaps this is too raw an emotion to expose. While Gauthier has tackled the pain head on, other adoptee songwriters — Diana Jones, Gillian Welch, Sarah McLachlan — have been more oblique.

In literature, the foundling has always been a popular subject. Read the Old Testament, fairy tales, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, novels and comic books, and you will find Moses, Snow White, Oedipus, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Tom Jones and Superman. Because life likes to imitate art, reuniting adopted children with their birth mother is a popular media story — especially if, like Clare Short or Joni Mitchell, the mother has a high profile — with an upbeat message.

In fiction, the foundling is a blank slate on which to create a life unburdened by the past. In reality, says Gauthier, “it feels like you’re falling through space eternally”. More than 40 years after she was left in St Vincent’s Women’s and Infants’ Asylum in New Orleans, she tracked down her birth mother. That first stilted, apologetic conversation is recounted in March 11, 1962, the emotional centre of both the album and her current live shows. In the third verse, the lyrics hit you like a slow-motion car crash: “You say that I’m a secret nobody knowsyou can’t talk about it nowyou really gotta go.”

Yet the question that had dogged Gauthier all her life — “Who am I?” — had in part been answered. “I had found my birth mother. It wasn’t what I wanted to find, but there’s not a question mark any more. The little kid in me is gonna be dealing with abandonment until my last breath. I’m driven to write songs as a way of making sense of my life.

Most songwriters — like most people — have a family and know where they come from. Adoptees can lack that sense of place. Raised in an emotionally troubled family, Gauthier always felt she “didn’t belong”. “I always knew I was gay. I was an alcoholic from my first drink. There was just a hole. I had to get sober and start to heal from addiction before I could create art,” she explains.

“The interesting thing about being adopted,” says the singer-songwriter Diana Jones, “is, potentially, you could be from anywhere, from any kind of family, any kind of background. I grew up having all these fantasy families in my head. All my childhood, I had a sense of longing for home, a need to belong. I had to find me before I could figure out what I wanted to write, and that took time.”

Growing up just outside New York listening to show tunes, the Stones and the Beatles, Jones had fallen in love with Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison and found herself drawn to roots music. She finally tracked down her mother’s family in Tennessee. Her grandfather Robert Lee Maranville, who had once played with Chet Atkins, had a similar-sounding voice.

“I do believe there is a genetic connection between where I come from and the music I play,” she says. “Finding my biological family explained so much about who I am, but it took me a while to feel like I could claim it.” After her grandfather died in 2000, Jones, who had previously released two indifferent albums, found her voice — My Remembrance of You (2006) and Better Times Will Come (2009) are gems, more roots than country, full of beautifully observed songs set off by the warmth of her voice. Pony, about a Native American child taken from a reservation and placed in a settlement school, and All God’s Children, about kids who leave foster care at 18 with nowhere to go, are songs not just informed but enhanced by her experience. “I’m only interested in true stories,” she says. “For me, it’s to make sense of my story, but also to make sense of it in the context of the world.”

Gillian Welch’s adoptive parents were entertainers who moved to LA to write for The Carol Burnett Show. Her biological mother hailed from the mountains of North Carolina and her father was a drummer. Like Gauthier, she doesn’t do happy, preferring to chronicle the misfortune and torments that befall the disconnected living on society’s edge. Abandonment in all its forms — drug addiction, poverty, the wreckage of love — is the spine that runs through her songs.

Some adoptees, however, have fewer issues. “I got told I was adopted when I was nine, and it was never a big deal to me,” says the Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan. “I met my birth mother when I was 18. It was neat, because so many things I felt started to make sense, but, especially after I became successful, she wanted too much. I have a mother already. The older I become, the more I realise I am more like her through environmental conditioning.”

As Joni Mitchell has discovered, giving up your child for adoption is both a catalyst for creation and a scar that never heals. In 1965, when she was a penniless art student, she handed over her baby girl. She didn’t speak about it publicly for 30 years, but the clues were stamped all over her songs — especially Little Green, from Blue. “It left a hole in me,” she said, “that I didn’t fill until the day I saw her again. In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss.”

When touring with Jones, Gauthier found they had much in common. Both had been adopted into dysfunctional families, left home at 15 and lived rough; and both have adoptive brothers with drug problems. Music was not part of their childhood — “There were no books, no music, no art,” Jones says — and they came to it relatively late. Jones was an artist, Gauthier a chef who wrote her first song at 35.

During their discussions, Jones introduced Gauthier to the work of BJ Lifton, an advocate of adoption reform. “Her books helped me to understand, to the point where I knew I was ready to write this record,” Gauthier says. “I wanted to write it as a song cycle, like Willie Nelson did with Red Headed Stranger; to start at the beginning, work to some sense of redemption and, in the end, come out and say, ‘I still believe in love.’”

“On a good day,” she says, “I believe. On a hard day, I need to believe.”

The Foundling is out now; Mary Gauthier is touring in June

The Daily Dose

Confessional albums are certainly nothing new in the singer/songwriter idiom, but there’s a continuum. I mean, there are personal songs, and then there are songs that take your breath away with their honesty. Mary Gauthier’s seventh album,The Foundling, will leave you gasping for 46 minutes and 37 seconds.

Gauthier has lived a life straight out of a country song — she spent her 18th birthday in jail; she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston; she didn’t start writing songs until she was in her 30s — but all those colorful details pale beforeThe Foundling, which tells her most personal story. Given up for adoption shortly after birth, Gauthier struggled with what she calls “the ‘orphan feeling’” for most of her life. At the age of 45, she was finally successful in finding her birth mother, only to discover that she’d kept Gauthier’s existence a secret from everyone in her life, including her deceased husband and grown children. Denied a meeting, Gauthier had to heal herself the only way she knew how: with music.

It’s a sad story, but make no mistake, The Foundling is a cathartic album; it’s shot through with mournfulness and a desperate longing to be loved, but there’s a grace to the sadness. There’s no bitterness here, only unblinking reflection. When she sings “I still believe in love” toward the end, you know Gauthier has come by that belief the hard way, and you feel richer for sharing her journey. Heartbroken, but richer. And heartbroken in a good way — it’s important to stress that even though The Foundling probes a profound wound in its creator’s heart, it’s a warm, uplifting piece of work, and one drawn across the spectrum of Gauthier’s musical roots. You hear a lot of country-inflected folk, with high harmonies and keening, whipsawing fiddles, but there are also hints of her New Orleans heritage (the drunken carousel of “Sideshow”) and moments of pure, stark, simple beauty (“Blood Is Blood,” “Walk in the Water”). And the album’s emotional centerpiece — the one-sided conversation “March 11, 1962? — will cut you wide open.

It isn’t the kind of album that’s destined to be a hit, obviously. But if songwriting matters to you, and you look to music to move you, then The Foundling is a gift you’ll cherish for a good, long while.

I’ve decided that the tour for The Foundling should be called the Bastard Love Tour. Sounds right and true to me. So from here on out, as the bastard love tour rolls in circles around the circular globe we all live and love on, I will try to update this blog and share highlights of my experiences as I present my new songs to folks around the world in places big and small. My first round of shows for this record were in Australia with my friend Ed Romanoff. We spent a month running around the land of Oz without much time to stop and think. I played bars, theaters, rock clubs, folk listening rooms, dozens of radio shows, record stores, a performed a song with the house band for a TV game show at a huge sold out legendary theater in Sydney for a TV show called RockWiz LIVE.  Flew across the continent(5 hours) from Melbourne to Perth with only three hours of sleep to play a festival for 50 minutes. Got our feet wet in the Indian Ocean.

Taj Mahal, Me, and Ed Romanoff at the Perth Blues and Roots Festival

Everywhere I went people had their own stories to tell. It turns out Australia has a long troubled history around adoption but has gone to extraordinary measures to make up for prior wrongs. Adoption activists there actually got the government to apologize for practices that removed Aboriginal children from their birth families. Over and over again people told me their stories, and it was amazing for me to witness the same emotional processes in people on the other side of the world I’ve gone thru in the good old US of A. We humans are all so much alike the world over. Whats the old cliche? People are people. Turns out, we are all exactly that. The same.

I got back to Nashville jet lagged and weary, but soon enough I was ready to take on the next leg of the tour, which brought me to the east coast of America, Boston, NYC and upstate New York. Tania Elizabeth, the amazing Canadian fiddle player/vocalist, joined us at The Iron Horse in Northampton,MA, and is now an official part of my touring group. She played all over the record, and having her on the road with me is a huge treat. She’s a road dog of the olympic gold metal variety, having been on the road non-stop for the last 8 years with the Canadian band The Duhks. She knows her way around soundchecks, airports, festival stages, hotels and CD tables, and she is mesmerizing on stage. It’s a thrill to have her up there with me. Tania, Ed and I opened several shows for The Cowboy Junkies, and played our own shows in upstate New York ( where Woodstock locals Rachel Yamagata and Tom Pacheco came by to say hello, two of my favorite singer songwriters writing songs today).

We then went on a three show run with Mindy Smith, played Minneapolis and Chicago and Cedar Rapids Iowa (near the hallowed halls of the Iowa writers workshop where Flannery O’Connner studied writing as a young woman).

Mindy Smith, Lex Price, Ed Romanoff, Me, Tania Elizabeth in Cedar Rapids Iowa

Tonight I am in London, where I will be for the next week doing radio and press interviews. It’s cold tonight, they say a frost is possible, but Ed and I are going to walk to Chinatown for some hot and spicy food no matter what.

The bastard love tour is not afraid of a little frost…..in mid May. Not afraid at all. If I can get my feet to Chinatown in any town for some spicy salty squid and sauteed Chinese green veggies, I always will.

A review by Douglas Heselgrave

I thought I knew the blues. I haven’t always been careful. My life has been full of reckless and foolish mistakes. Like most people my age, I’ve suffered through my share of loss and pain, but it all pales in the shadow of what Mary Gauthier has been through.

Gauthier’s new CD, “The Foundling” is the product of two years work, and is quite simply the best collection of songs she’s ever recorded. An intensely personal album, “The Foundling” recounts Gauthier’s struggle to find her birth mother after being abandoned by her shortly after her birth in March 1962. In the hands of a less capable artist, a concept album about the search for and ultimate rejection from one’s mother would be doomed to failure. It is an idea that could so easily go awry as to be impossible or embarrassing to listen to. There are so many complex emotions involved that it would be easy to give into the temptation to cheapen them, aim at the lowest common denominator, and go right for the listener’s heartstrings. And, while I would defy anyone to remain dry eyed by the time The Foundling’s thirteen tracks have run their course, Gauthier’s work is too mature and fully formed to settle for being nothing more than a vicarious thrill. The emotions described, explored and eviscerated throughout The Foundling’s tale have obviously ripened over the artist’s lifetime and settled in deeply enough to be explored with precision – if not with detachment.

‘The Foundling’ isn’t easy listening music. It’s often hard to approach as it’s so rare to hear songs that reach as far as these ones do. Time and time again, Mary Gauthier resists every temptation to elevate her suffering and put it into a mythical framework as younger artists so often do when trying to communicate their feelings of loss. These are songs stripped of their filters and protection, and are often so honest as to be artless. Yet, somehow Mary Gauthier’s commitment and fearlessness shine through and she gets away with expressing things that a less mature musician would stumble on. She’s aiming so far left of the top forty that she often ends up in territory that is all but uncharted.

The facts of Mary Gauthier’s life have been well documented on her previous albums. Her struggles with alcohol, drugs and the law have all found their way into her music, but until now the motivations or underlying causes of her actions have been rather hard to understand. The story told by the songs on her new disc put all of her past work into perspective and give it more power.

The songs on ‘The Foundling’ follow an arc of fear, expectation and resignation. The first few tracks “The Foundling”, “Mama Here, Mama Gone” and “Goodbye” explore the grief that Gauthier experienced as she struggled to come to terms with being put in an orphanage shortly after her birth. A resolution was made, and at the age of 45, Gauthier searched for, found and was denied a meeting with her birth mother who had hidden her youthful indiscretion from everyone she knew. The brief telephone call with her that Gauthier describes on “March 11, 1962” must certainly qualify as one of the most heartbreaking songs ever committed to tape. Spare in its lyrics, the pain and unfathomable loss are suggested rather than described as she recounts her mother’s wounded plea of ‘why are you calling me?’ The songs that follow it represent a scramble to come to terms with her mother’s unwillingness to meet. From the absolute despair of Walk in the Water’ that rests on the refrain ‘ I want to walk in the water until my hat floats away’, things pick up a bit as Gauthier tries to put her best foot forward with the muted optimism of ‘Sweet Words’ and ‘The Orphan King’ with its unsure assertion ‘ I still believe in love.’ Unwilling to leave her audience in a lurch as her mother did to her, and as if to assure them that she will continue on in her life without succumbing to her personal demons again, Gauthier finishes the album on a strong note with the resolute and inspiring ‘Another Day Borrowed.’

Over the past several albums, Gauthier has worked with some of the best producers in the roots music business. Gurf Molix and Joe Henry have each had turns with her work, and the results have always been worthwhile. Still, it must be admitted that there has always been something slightly generic or incomplete in their approach to her music. Gauthier’s vocal range is somewhat limited and previous producers have gone out of their way to decorate her work and make it appealing to folk, country and blues fans and as a result missed something essential in her songs. This time out, Gauthier chose to work with Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, and she has finally found a producer up to the challenge of presenting her music in the best possible light. Gauthier’s voice and trademark rhythm guitar accompaniment are still front and centre, but for the first time she’s been given a sympathetic soundscape that elevates her music and gives room for the emotions she expresses to roam and expand. Resting somewhere between rough and polished, Timmins’ guitar is a background wail, an undercurrent over which Gauthier questions and sings. With Margo Timmins background vocals and a yearning violin as counterpoints, for the first time, Gauthier has achieved a musical context that is as profound and satisfying as the songs she sings.

With ‘The Foundling’, Mary Gauthier has created her first masterpiece. It may not be a record that people want to listen to every day or sit through in its entirety very often, but it is great art that reminds listeners of what the blues could be, but rarely are. Not for the easily frightened, ‘The Foundling’ is the most raw, brave and ultimately satisfying album I’ve heard in a very long time. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

The Foundling will be released on May 18, 2010-04-20.

See Doug’s interviews with Mary about the making of The Foundling below.

An interview with Mary Gauthier

Part Two of the Interview